He loved to eat, Sawyer admitted it, but then, which Greenwing didn't? It's just that he was developing this embarrassing paunch. Which most Greenwings did NOT do. "Why me?", he asked himself. He was not a spectacularly voracious eater. He didn't gorge himself - too often.

It is true, as he aged, he had slowed down some. He didn't leap and soar with quite the same gusto as he had a few hundred years back. Still, it made no sense to him, and the very thought of it had him reaching for the nearest leftovers.

And now this business with the creature the Ice Goddess had sent. What was he supposed to do about that? He couldn't abide a threat to his food supply, this close to winter. But what could a Spotted Greenwing contribute to such an enterprise? Tracking it down, and either appeasing or confronting it, (depending on the faction you supported), well it just wasn't his thing.

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Dooley should have guessed something would have to go wrong. He'd promised their mothers that the young lads in his care would be safe and able to settle themselves into Desert Rim Forests with a minimum of fuss. The young dragons were eager to try their wings, and a bit of distance was good for youngsters, out from their mothers' irksome though loving eye.

Now of course, they wanted to join in with the shenanigans over this feral dragon, or whatever the darn thing was, and it was all he could do to hold them back. Though what they thought to offer in the way of aid, he couldn't see. But they wanted to be part of the excitement, and he could understand that, so he let them join the arguments for and against a posse to track the creature down, but forbade them to participate beyond words.

Their mothers would skin him alive if they found out!

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Pour was so frustrated! Finally, they were in the midst of a true adventure, and Dooley Unwin, the silly old coot, wouldn't let him and Nexis Mix join in. This sort of expedition was made for young dragons with health and youth on their side. They could leave the older dragons behind, in terms of climbing the Alpine Ridge, and cover much more distance from the tops of the trees, than from the ground. Why couldn't Dooley get that?

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Nexis couldn't wait for old Dooley Unwin to fall asleep, which he was apt to do at the least provocation, because then he could sneak off and join the expedition into the forest. He knew he'd pay for it later, but this was too good an opportunity to miss.

The question was, whether he let his brother in on the escape. Pour Four was a bit too chatty, you couldn't always trust him to say nothing. And it would be just like the silly kid to let something slip out, either in front of Dooley himself, or one of the other so-called 'adults' in the group heading out to find the beast.

New Z, as his friends called him, couldn't believe no one had suggested it earlier. The priests at the Wayist Temple Of The Moon were the obvious choice for advice on the arcane and supernatural. And this was one or the other, surely.

And for a bonus, that interesting Magi dragon, Golden Furl was joining him. It may have a serious purpose, but he was looking forward to the journey.

A journey that involved no serious dangers, but which was made difficult by having no clear path. The Wayists say this is fundamental to their beliefs. Each must find his or her own way to insight and wisdom.

Well, they weren't necessarily in search of those two laudable goals at the moment though. They simply wanted to know how to rid the Desert Rim Forests of this strange creature, causing such a furore among the populace, as well as stealing food.

Tamra just didn't get it. What was all the fuss over? If a dragon, no matter the size, or the origin, be it mundane or exotic, invaded his home territory, he would simply hunt it down and set it on its way, at the least. Even kill it, if need be. Perservation of your food supply was an absolute priority, surely?

But this lot at Desert Rim Forests had the most extraordinary idea that this dragon was a mythical creature of some sort. Why? Yes, it is big, and yes it made a fair display of magical abilities, what with all the disappearing into the mist stuff. Nothing but showy Gypsy stuff really though.

A Frostbite dragon is just a dragon, plain and simple, and not likely to attack the forest dwellers, even though this one did seem a bit, well, uncivilized. But it was totally out of character for a Frostbite to do other dragons harm, and he felt certain it could be convinced to stop raiding the food supplies of the locals without resorting to violence, or arcane potions and ritual sacrifices!

A good talking to would probably put the silly dragon in its place, Tamra thought.

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What a colossal waste of time for her and her partner, Tamra Red! As if a Frostbite dragon's path wasn't clearly marked in the snow, the trees and the undergrowth. Surely they didn't need expert hunters to track this rogue dragon to its lair.

No, they wanted something else entirely. They wanted someone brave enough to face the "monster" for them. Which is how it was viewed by many, and indeed worshiped by some in this strange settlement. And to think they actually considered emigrating here!

Well, while the residents can't decide what to do, either one way or the other, she really should get on with it. It was a good paying task, these dragons were not without resources, and at least it was a bit out of the ordinary, a new use of their skills - Frostbite tamers!

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After such a hew and cry, it was not any of the dragons involved in the controversy that solved the riddle of the Frostbite marauder, but two Speckle-Throated dragons, playing in the foothills of Alpine Ridge.

There, they ran into a pair of cheeky Blue-Banded dragons, playing in the stream. Izuga and Madam Rumpole were enjoying the game immensely, and so were disappointed when their new friends, Splash Puddle Jumperand Splish Puddle Jumper declared an early end to the hi-jinks on account of a secret mission they had to go on. Well, if that wasn't an open invitation to follow them, Izuga thought, he couldn't think what would be. So the two Speckle-Throated dragons, with as much as they could muster, followed the Blue-Banded dragons to their rendezvous.

They were so intent on keeping up, they almost ran into the dragon their friends had come to meet - none other than the infamous Ice Goddess herself!

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What fun these new companions were! Madam had never met Blue-Banded dragons before, but if they were all like these, she'd be happy to share her cave with one or two.

But then they said they had to leave to go to a secret rendezvous further into the alpine regions. She and Izuga Luck decided to follow them discreetly to see what they were really up to, and what a surprise that was! The dragon they had come to meet was as huge as a house, as white as snow, well, more silvery than that, but... pretty, but really cold too. The greatest villain of the whole region, and their friends were her friends?! Surely not!

And no, they didn't look all that friendly actually. Splish and Splash Puddle Jumper (PJs for short) looked downright terrified of the enormous Frost dragon, is that what the dragons from Coastedge Wood called it? No, Frostbite, that was it! Whatever. It was really scary! And look, the latest haul from the Desert Rim Forests, which she seemed to be giving to the Blue-Banded dragons. What on earth was all that about?

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Splash was growing tired of the game. At first, it was fun taking the kills that Sanaa Ice brought them, hauling them over to the Volcanic Regions and passing them on to Trans Lucia Materna. Now it was getting tiresome, and just a bit scary.

This monster dragon, Sanaa Ice, was getting just a little bit too much fun out of the fear she was instilling among the inhabitants of Desert Rim Forests. And while Splash understood that it was all in a good cause, he worried that the Forest dwellers may not be meeting their needs if Sanaa Ice kept up this pace.

And why the secrecy? Why not just ask the locals outright if they would donate food in order to keep Trans Lucia Materna strange hatchlings fed? Few dragons can stand by and ignore the needs of infants. But these ones were, admittedly, weird. They never aged, some Alpine dragons claimed. But no one really knew their story. Where had they come from? What had happened to their parents? And what was with their need for so much flesh? Some of them weren't even carnivores!

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PJ Splash was so naive in some ways, Splish thought. What did he think those creatures of Trans Lucia Materna were!? Seemingly eternally trapped in their juvenile state. Voracious appetites for flesh, well, for the blood that was still in the kills (they'd been told, after all, to be careful not to drain the carcasses). Hidden away in the dark, never venturing out into the light of day.

They were vampires of course! It was obvious! These were some kind of casualties of the Vampire Wars. What, exactly, he couldn't guess. But it didn't matter to him anyway. They were obviously innocents, being mere hatchlings, and their vampire-like status was certainly not their fault, and so he and all other adult dragons had a responsibility for them.

He knew few other dragons felt this responsibility as keenly he did. But he never wavered in his dedication to hatchlings. Which is why he'd taken on this task despite some misgivings about the wisdom of the move. Now, he decided, it would be his duty to warn Trans Lucia Materna that their "cover" was blown, and that angry citizens may be on their way to voice their objections to their unknowing and involuntary contributions to the cause.

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The Blue-Banded scalawag was right, of course. Materna's wards were indeed little vampire younglings, doomed to an eternal hatchling stasis, never mature or strong enough to care for themselves. Without her care, these younglings would waste away to a hell of unassuaged hunger and a nightmare of foggy incomprehension, unable to die, yet unable to live.

Hatchlings attacked by Vampires can either die outright and instantly, or when they hatch. Or they can become Vampire eggs, growing into maturity in the "natural" way - although there was nothing natural about a vampire. However, a very, very few actually survive the bite and the hatching, without becoming full vampires. They do seem to be missing the necessary growth hormones, and need blood and marrow to live.

Trans Lucia Materna, whose own egg died of a vampire bite, protects and cares for these stranglings, wherever she can find them. She is totally unaware that she is following the path of a single, insane and deadly vampire, Tru Dru.

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Tru Dru had been "drifting northwest" with her mate William The Bloody Mac, as the KayMac Concordat dictated, but she was not keeping the agreement they had made. She didn't see any reason to bother her "sweet boy" with that information.

Tru Dru was the creator of all those mysterious "Immortal Hatchlings" of Trans Lucia Materna. She had it in her head that she would like to be a mother, so she sometimes bit an egg despite the Concordat, hoping to create a little vampire egg to raise.

On very rare occasions, the hatchlings survived, but not unchanged. These small creatures seem trapped forever in hatchling bodies, doomed to feed on dragon's blood, but totally without the ability to fend for themselves. Tru Dru, not seeing the result she was looking for, ignored these little souls, and it was Trans Lucia Materna, having lost her own egg to a vampire bite, who found and cared for them.

Eventually, Dru did manage to create a true vampire hatchling, Miss Edith. But her spasmodic attentions caused it to die at hatching, and, to William's patient disgust, she took to dragging around the poor dead and rotting thing, talking to it whenever the strain of reality became too much for her.

William just prayed they'd get out of the Desert before any Desert Dwellers caught up with them.

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Miss Edith's (known to its real parents only as Muffin) hatching was to have been the crowning event of the political marriage between two great Volcanic Regions families - the Hexamandyrs and the Marinas. These Magma x Sunstone aristocrats ruled the island archipelago to the Northeast of Cave Island.

For centuries, they had maintained a tense quarantine around each other's fiefdoms, and this hatchling was the embodiment of the "walls tumbling down". Now they tear themselves apart trying to find the culprit who sabotaged the entente cordiale by stealing the egg on the eve of its hatching.

Its gruesome and sorry state as a hatchling-substitute in the hands of the mad vampire, Tru Dru, put to bitter end years of patient diplomacy.

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Before anyone can still remember, and that's a REALLY long time, there were many local deities, each having control of some aspects of the elements. Even today, there exist those who can influence the environment in a noticeable way. For example, the Greys and the Undines.

This tale, however, is not about such dragons, but of powerful gods and godesses of the past, who ruled through magic, often in terrible ways.

The Ice Goddess was one of those Gods who ruled through fear. She could, and did when she was crossed, freeze the offender alive, then leave the suffering dragon to slowly melt away in agony. She also used her power to send frost to flatten dragons' usual game and vegetation areas, letting them starve or forcing them to move on.

Such stories are normally mocked, and considered tales for hatchlings and the less mature younglings around the fire on a cold night. Yet suddenly, in the short-lived predations of one lone "jokester" Frostbite dragon, the old ways of thinking leaped the millenniums to become 100% credible to a supposedly modern settlement.

This, more than anything else, many dragons of a more 'enlightened' pose, declare, this sudden superstition was the best (and only) argument for the Wayist's nonsense about dragons having origins which equally defy imagination - that we were all once humans, before the catastrophe!

The most recent of Trans Lucia Materna's "offspring", and perhaps the most peculiar of them all was a young hatchling barely out of the egg, a coastal dragon clearly, meant to spend its time cavorting in the shallows of the bays and inlets. Certainly not wandering around the Volcanic Regions proclaiming itself to be the "Key to the Cataclysm". It was anxious to be on its way in a search for a dragon named Human, or a human named Dragon, it was not very clear on the details, only that he must get to the Wayist Temple Of The Moon by whatever means necessary.

Despite an arduous trek across the Alpine Ridge following Materna to her rendezvous with the monstrously large but perfectly friendly Frostbite dragon, it seemed worth the effort. A lift on the back of such a creature was just the thing. She was on her way back to her Alpine home, and she wouldn't mind giving a youngster a lift. And then, almost there, Cypher could accompany the cheerful but strangely named Splish and Splash Puddle Jumper, who promised to show him the best of the best lagoons and streams along the way.

In cryptography, a cipher (or cypher) is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption—a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. To encipher or encode is to convert information from plain text into cipher or code.

There was nothing immortal or even unusual about What's The Yolk. She was just an ordinary hen taking care of her chick.

But Yolk was caught up in historical moments beyond her field of thought, and witnessed events that meant nothing to her, but which were fundamental elements of a revolution in thinking throughout her world.

It must be very boring to live without dragons for friends, Chickadee believed. Only dragons are big enough and agile enough to take him flying with them like his friends from the flocks of Crimson Flare pygmies did.

He wished he a dragon. Or anybody except an immortal joke, unable to grow up or grown old, stuck forever in this satanic limbo.

Dragons in the Coastedge Woods have been puzzled quite a long time, a century or two at least, about the poor empty shell found on the coast.

It had clearly been bitten by a vampire, but that species no longer hunted in Penddraig or the Dragon Caves. Not since the defeat and almost extinction of their kind in the last and famous battle in the Northwestern Desert that ended the Vampire Wars.

There little hatchling was totally traumatize by being first bitten, then hatching, and then abandonment that was his treatment with his short life with Tru Dru. Luckily, Trans Lucia Materna was not far behind Dru, and came to his rescue, little knowing that the nameless one was causing so much mystification at the opposite end of the island.

At least one of the orphaned offspring enjoyed their home in relative comfort. It may not match the sense of love and kinship, but the cave Trans Lucia Materna had found for them was warm and dry, high up so they would know if trouble was coming.

But Firefox never forgot for a moment the difference between his life before and his strange existence now. He hated every mouthful of dragon blood he took, but he had no other means of survival.

Trans Lucia Materna knew long before she arrived there, that the scene would be almost unbearable. She knew that cloying smell of dragon blood and flames. But even knowing what was coming could not insulate her from the horror of the slaughterhouse scenes that confronted her.

Mint Dragons are a particularly peaceful breed, and the Shyleaf Clan was even more timid than the rest. They were a kind and gentle dragon, which many other breeds appreciated for their soothing effect on anyone's nerves.

Before her lay the whole tribe, torn apart in a frenzy of violence such as Materna had never imagined possible. This was not just the blood thirst that her poor hatchlings suffered through, but an expression of such rage! Well, there was nothing she could do for these poor dragons, but their blood would come in handy for her brood. A mother dragon must do what she must to protect her hatchlings.

Before she could do more than think about it, a tiny cheep, hesitant and high pitched, came from beneath one of the fallen dragons. It was a survivor of the massacre! A little hatchling turning fear-filled eyes towards her. Will you look after me or eat me?, they seemed to say.

So she became another of the strangelings in Materna's nest, although she never once uttered a word.